Dust and Death
by Atiaran
Summary: A Fallout: New Vegas fic. Set during my story "The Divide," an interlude between Arcade and the Courier as they journey back to the Mojave. Female Courier, named Samara; possible spoilers.


**Standard disclaimer:** None of the characters, places, etc. in this story are mine, but are instead the property of Bethesda Game Studios. No copyright infringement is intended by their use in this story.

**Author's note:** An interlude that takes place during Samara's and Arcade's journey back to the Mojave after killing Ulysses. Grew from a suggestion by **taliatoennien **during discussion of my previous story "The Divide_."_ This was an extra; the two other short pieces I mentioned in the A/N for "The Divide" are still to come. Thanks to **LadyKate1** who betaed this and "The Divide" even though I forgot to mention it there .

* * *

The two of them shared a silent meal, sitting on opposite sides of the dark, cold fire ring, protected from the wind that blew fitfully through the crevice by a slight outcropping of rock. Arcade's chili and macaroni tasted sickening and chemical on his tongue; and the tightness in his stomach was such that he could barely swallow it down. Samara, with beef stew on the other side of the unlit fire, showed nothing. Her face was blank, distant. The silence seemed like a wall between them.

She finished, discarding the empty packet, and rose to her feet. Arcade followed suit, gulping the last few bites down hastily. She stepped away from the fire ring, out onto the narrow trail threading its way between two walls of rock, and Arcade took up his by-now customary position behind her.

They hadn't spoken in a day and a half.

[*]

Samara was in front as the sun passed overhead; leading the way as she had during the long expedition throughout the Divide. She led, but she was scarcely there. There was something absent and ashen about her, something _attenuated_. The feral, superhuman force that had borne her onward to Ulysses had been wholly expended in their final climactic battle; all that was carrying her forward now was inertia. She drifted onward aimlessly, pointlessly; a hollow tumbleweed, blown on by the wind. He half expected her to simply float away. Despite it all, despite everything, his heart ached to see her like that.

And as she drifted, Arcade followed at her back, with murder on his mind.

_No. Not murder. Execution._

_Execution, brahmin crap, _some part of him argued. _Call it whatever name you like, you're considering the taking of a human life in cold blood and without provocation, and the word for that is murder. __**Malum in se.**__ In the NCR, it's even a legally prosecutable crime. _

_Well, we're not in the NCR. And if what I'm considering is murder, then what the hell was it that __**she**__ did?_

The other part of him was silent.

_I can think of a couple terms. Genocide; there's one. Crimes against humanity; there's another. What are fitting punishments for those, do you think?_

Again, no response came from within him. Arcade rubbed at his temples. It felt like a vicious headache was starting.

He said none of this to Samara.

[*]

Morbid, gruesome images dogged his footsteps as they pressed onward through the narrow passageway, the towering cliffs on either side looming as if to slam shut and trap them within. Charred muscle and bone, open, oozing, gaping sores. Men, women, children, eyes melted, skin slipping right off raw flesh. Blackened corpses contorted in death agonies. The Followers had an extensive library of such materials, collected in the aftermath of the Great War; every trainee was introduced to them, to lend weight to the meaning of the Followers' oath: _Never again._ Arcade knew _exactly_ the consequences of what Samara had done; he could see them as clearly as if he were standing on the edge of the smoking, burned-out crater, smelling the sweetish stench of burned and rotting bodies. He knew exactly what Samara had done ...

_(and what he had let her do)_

His thoughts chased each other in blackened, festering circles and his stomach churned as he followed at Samara's heels.

_Samara committed mass murder. The woman I am following is a murderess on a scale that makes anyone other than the Legion look like pikers._

Arcade had lived in the Wastes long enough to have a good understanding of just how fluid and elastic words like "murder" and "criminal" and "innocent" were. Very few people could survive in the Wastes for any length of time without adding some bodies to their count; Arcade had not been one of them ... even before he had met Samara. And while he told himself - and knew it was mostly true - that those he had slain had been guilty, there were times late at night when he faced the cold hard truth that "innocent" and "guilty" were just words humans created, to try and bring some order, some justice to a fundamentally unjust world.

But what Samara had done was on a different scale all together. It was an act of destruction - of_ slaughter_ - orders of magnitude greater than anything since - _since the Great War itself,_ Arcade realized, cold. The number of her victims was incalculable; the amount of blood on her hands staggered him to contemplate.

And how much of that blood did he share?

He hadn't stopped her - had given up after one feeble try. Sure, she had been holding a gun on him, he acknowledged; but honestly, what was his own life against the thousands - the _hundreds_ of thousands - Samara had slain? _No,_ that stern, uncompromising part of himself stated implacably. _You should have made her kill you before you allowed her to launch that missile. The fact that you're still walking around untouched is __**ipso facto**__ proof that you're every bit as guilty as she is._

Arcade no longer even tried to argue against that part of himself. All the fine words he threw at it shattered on that stony absolutism. He couldn't defend himself against an accusation that, deep down, he knew was utterly merited, justified and right.

_Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red_.

And so it was, as Samara led and he followed, that he found his mind turning toward words like _justice_ and _execution._

[*]

_Samara is a mass murderer. She needs to die. It would be justice._

_Killing Samara won't bring back those she killed,_ he protested.

_Samara is a mass murderer. She needs to die. It would be justice._

_What she did was bad, but ... to be perfectly honest, she was not wrong when she said it was a chance to strike a knockout blow against the Legion,_ he argued.

_Samara is a mass murderer. She needs to die. It would be justice._

And always, in the background, piles of charred, smoking bodies. Bodies by the thousands, filling his mind, his thoughts. The filthy, reeking heap of corpses loomed, a mute, towering, unanswerable reproach. What defense could possibly prevail against such a monstrous quantity of death?

He drifted after Samara, exhausted, numb and sick, his mind slowly and remorselessly ticking over the stages of acute radiation syndrome. _Nausea and vomiting present first,_ he thought, _followed by heavy diarrhea, crippling headache, and fever. Those with greatest exposure die in under two days. Those with moderate exposure enter a latency period of seven to twenty-eight days after which time symptoms return with greater severity accompanied by dizziness, cognitive disturbances, electrolyte imbalance, shock and severe leukopenia. Mortality rates without treatment are as high as 95 to 100 percent. With intensive treatment mortality rates range from 50 to 100 percent depending on dose received ..._

_Samara is a mass murderer. She needs to die. It would be justice. _

[*]

_I can't kill her_.

The sun was sinking, its long, slanting rays shining straight down the narrow chasm, drawing vibrant reds and oranges and golds from the walls. Its rays struck directly into Arcade's eyes, making him squint; ahead of him, Samara was an empty black shape, wavering and unsteady in the brilliant light. His eyes watered.

_Samara is a mass murderer. She needs to die. It would be -_

_Oh, shut up already. I __**can't**__ kill her, don't you see? The very idea is ridiculous_. An image flashed before his eyes, displacing the dark and rotting corpses: himself, drawing his Plasma Defender, aiming it at her back, firing - only to have his pathetic little green flash dissipate over her armor as she spun and faced him, her face a demon's, her LAER in hand, the light from her eyes brighter than the glow at the end of the barrel. _Me, killing __**her?**__ I had more of a chance against Rawr - more of a chance against those Marked Men. _

_Then at least you can die trying. Like you should have in the temple of Ulysses. Samara is a mass murderer. She needs to die. It would be justice._

His headache was getting worse; the sun's glare was blinding him. It was starting to localize now, over his right eye; it felt like shards of glass were being driven into his brain.

_Samara is a mass murderer. She needs to -_

_Shut up._

[*]

_I can't kill her._

_Why not?_

_I can't kill her, don't you see?_

_Then you can die trying. It would be atonement._

_No. Don't you understand? I can't. I __**can't.**_

_I can't kill her. _

_I. Can't. Kill. Her._

_She is a mass murderer, she deserves to die, a thousand thousand lives are calling out for justice, and oh, God, help me, I __**can't kill her.**_

The mountain of the dead loomed, towering up to the sun, blotting it out: hundreds upon thousands, men, women, children, twisted in agonized postures, a terrifying heap of mortality. Yet somehow his mind balanced it with a parallel image: Samara lying sprawled lifeless at Arcade's feet, those white eyes gazing upward, sightless. The first image sickened him; the second made him tremble and shake. To draw his weapon - actually _draw his weapon and fire on - _Samara, the woman who had clawed through ten feet of solid rock to rescue him, who had held him in her arms and wept when she thought him dead - She had shown him Big Mountain ... told him about her adventures beyond the Mojave ... recited poetry with him ... That he might _kill_ her -

It was unthinkable. He couldn't do it. Somehow, no matter what she had done, he didn't think he could _ever_ bring himself to kill her. No matter what.

_Samara ..._

_I can't kill her._

_Then you can die trying. It would be atonement. What do you think would happen if Samara saw you had pulled a weapon on her?_

He didn't have to imagine. The image of Samara's face as she marched on Ulysses was burned into his brain.

_I -_

_You can die trying. It would be atonement. Honestly, do you think you can go on living under this weight anyway?_

Arcade had no answer to that.

[*]

He followed Samara, his finger resting lightly on the trigger of his Plasma Defender. Thoughts circled restlessly in his brain. He would do it; he was sure he would do it. That part of him that had spoken earlier was right: it _would_ be atonement. Samara would slay him as she should have earlier and that would be the end of it. And he would never have to live with all that had happened. The thought of meeting his end at Samara's hands seemed somehow fitting.

He thought of the Followers, but they seemed distant. Julie Farkas probably would not miss him much in any case; she seemed to have been doing just fine without him while he was following Samara. And who else did he have who would even care if he was gone? No, there really wasn't anything to hold him to this earth ... anything that would or should stop him from doing what was required.

He would do it. He would. He _would._

_I will do it. I will. _

_I will._

_Now._

His skin prickled. Arcade drew in a breath, released it. It had never been so hard to say her name; it was like climbing a mountain. The silence pressed around him, holding him back; it felt impossible to break it.

"S ... " He had to stop and breathe again, trying to control himself. "Samara." No response. _"Samara."_

Now she glanced back at him. "Huh?"

"Get your weapon out." His voice was dry, hard. Arcade, detached, observed that it didn't seem to be coming from him.

Samara took her LAER from her back, checked the load. "What is it?"

"Turn around. Look at me."

She did so, showing no sign of alarm; even his drawn Plasma Defender rated no more than a glance. "What's going on?"

He drew another steadying breath. Random images flickered before his mind's eye, displacing the morbid, gruesome things that had dogged him: his mother, smiling; the Remnants, gathered around the campfire, passing bottles back and forth and laughing; men he had dated, slept with, sometimes let himself love a little - never a lot; letting someone that close would have been too dangerous, and after all, once bitten, twice shy. Julie Farkas and the Old Mormon Fort. Boone, gray eyes cold as a snake's. Samara. Her tears.

"I'm going to kill you."

[*]

Samara lapsed into stillness. Arcade waited, heart racing, for what he knew would be next: her eyes turning to granite, the demon rising in her face, the shock of sizzling energy along his nerves in the few brief moments before his world disintegrated -

"Why?"

Samara was watching him closely, but the demon in her was nowhere in evidence. Her eyes had not hardened to that terrifying stone-white. She was not even aiming her rifle at him, and her finger was nowhere near the trigger.

_Something's wrong ..._

"What ...?" Arcade knew he sounded stupid, but he was at such a loss he couldn't help it.

"Why are you going to kill me?"

The question rattled around his brain for a moment before making sense; he had to gather his scattered thoughts. "Justice," his voice grated in his ears. Her brows contracted slightly in puzzlement. "For your victims, Samara. The women and children of the Legion." That horrible cascade of death pressed against the back of his eyes, squeezing the words from him. "The innocent people you _killed._" Surely it would be coming now. He waited, keeping his eyes open, wanting to see her change. Wanting to see death coming for him.

Samara searched his face for a long moment, her forehead furrowed. Then she lowered her weapon.

"All right. Go ahead."

_What -_

In a thousand years, Arcade would never have expected to hear that response. His mind went blank. _Did she just -_ _Did she just say -_

"Samara ... "

"Go ahead," she repeated. "If you feel like you need to kill me, then I won't stop you. Go on and do it." She returned her weapon to her back and stood there, looking at him. Waiting.

_No. No. No -_ Arcade's shock was deepening into something within shouting distance of panic. _This isn't how it's supposed to go,_ his mind repeated blankly. She was supposed to have shot him the moment he said he was going to kill her, not - "I - you - you _want_ me to kill you?" he came out with.

Samara shrugged. "Everyone's got to die sometime. And if someone's going to kill me, I'd rather it be you."

Arcade felt his mind tossing like a ship under heavy seas. "You're - you're going to _let_ me kill you?"

"If you feel it's necessary," she said, shrugging again.

"I - I don't - but _why?_" _Why aren't you shooting __**me?!**_ he wanted to say.

"Why?" Samara asked. Her brow furrowed. "Because ... " She paused, as if trying to put into words something she felt on a gut level - so deep that she could barely articulate it. "Because you care more about right and wrong than anyone I've ever known," she said simply. "If you think I need to die for what I did to the Legion, well then ... you're probably right. So, go ahead. I won't stop you." She paused. For a moment - perhaps it was a trick of the light - she looked almost inexpressibly weary, pale and exhausted. "Besides, it might be nice to stop fighting at last."

She watched him, empty-handed, a strange earnestness - almost naivete - in her face. The calm acceptance he saw on her features - that if he felt she ought to die, then he was probably correct - staggered him like a blow to the head. His hand spasmed on the grip of his weapon.

"You - do _you _think what you did was wrong then?" he fumbled.

Samara shrugged again. "I don't care about right or wrong," she said with that same plain simplicity. "All that I care about is that it was necessary. But you _do_ care. So if you want to execute me - " She trailed off, spreading her hands ingenuously.

_My hands are of your color, but I shame / To wear a heart so white._ Arcade's eyes were prickling. All he could think was, _This wasn't supposed to happen - _He had been prepared for murderous fury, for a savage, instant attack that would end with his death - was prepared to accept it as just consequences for his own part in the whole affair. He had no idea how to proceed in the face of this quiet resignation.

"God_damn_ it, Samara!" His voice broke. "Stop - Stop making this so easy for me!" His weapon shook.

Her brows contracted over those pale eyes. "Arcade?" she asked. "I don't understand - "

"Stop - goddamn it, can't you fight back?"

"I'm not going to fight you, Arcade," she said slowly. "I don't want to fight you. I don't want to hurt you. You're my friend. I wouldn't want to do that. Not ever."

"Too late for _that_," he spat at her, before he even knew what he was saying.

"Too late - What do you mean?"

Arcade was breathing hard; it felt like he could not get enough air. "You - you - "

"Arcade?"

"You made me complicit in _murder_," he snarled. "When you launched the missile! And I - I - " _I stood by and did nothing, _he wanted to say, but somehow could not get the words out. _I didn't even __**try**__ to stop you._ That awful heap of death loomed, seeming to rest as a weight on his shoulders.

Samara's brows contracted further. For a moment he wondered if she were going to ask him what _complicit_ meant. "You're not a murderer, Arcade," she offered him at last. "_I _was the one who launched the missile, not you. You couldn't have stopped me. I wouldn't have let you. It's not your fault."

Arcade swallowed, painfully. "You held a gun on me, Samara." His voice cracked again. "You did it _twice._"

He fell silent, stunned. _Where the hell did __**that**__ come from?_ That hadn't been on his mind at all ... _had it?_ An intense self-disgust filled him - was this truly it? Was _this_ what lay beneath the mountain of bodies that had been dogging his heels all day? Did he truly count hundreds of thousands of deaths as equal to something as petty as his own pique that Samara had threatened him?

Samara's brow furrowed. "Twice?" she asked in confusion.

"At the top of the elevator shaft and after you killed Ulysses. That's twice. You did it _twice,_ Samara." He swallowed hard. Samara lowered her gaze, searching her memory.

"Oh. Yeah, I guess I did. But I only did it to stop you from interfering." She said it as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world, watching him with that painfully earnest expression. Arcade cursed shakily under his breath. His eyes were burning.

"Would you have done it?" Ah, hell, he _was_ crying now. _Goddamn it -_ Heedless, he pulled off his glasses with his free hand, scrubbing roughly at his eyes. Samara dissolved into misty blocks of pastel color.

"If you had tried to stop me, yes," she said matter-of-factly. "But you _didn't,_ Arcade."

He swallowed again, biting back something that felt like a sob. _Christ, pull it together. What's __**wrong**__ with you?_ He had a pretty good idea, actually - it was just stress from the entire experience, that was all - _but Jesus, in front of Samara -_

"I guess I didn't realize ... you would be so upset." Her voice came hesitantly. "I didn't mean for you to be so upset. I'm sorry."

"Sorry you did it?" He had turned his face away from her, still scrubbing at his eyes; he didn't want her to see him like this. Some part of his mind, coldly rational despite everything, observed that with him so blinded, this would be the perfect moment for Samara to charge him and overpower him. She did not.

"No. I would do it again if I had to."

"Because it was _necessary._" The word was acid on his tongue.

"Right," she said promptly. "But I'm sorry I upset you by doing it." She paused. "I would never want to upset you, Arcade. You're my friend." _There, that word again._

"Maybe I'm _not_ your friend, Samara." It came out vicious, savage.

"I said you were my friend. I never said I was yours," she responded quietly. Arcade noted the nuance there and wondered at it.

There was silence for a time, while Arcade struggled to master himself. At last, Samara asked, in that painfully earnest, naïve way of hers, "Are you going to shoot me?"

"Go to hell."

"Arcade ... " The colors that defined her shifted; Arcade guessed she had started to reach out to him, then thought better of it. "Please ... don't cry, Arcade?" she pleaded softly. "I don't want you to cry ... "

The reference to his tears infuriated him. "I mean it. _Get out of here,"_ he snarled.

There was a hurt, bewildered silence from her for a moment, then she acquiesced. "All right. If that's what you want, Arcade," she said meekly. He heard her armor whine as she turned away. "I'll be back in a little while."

[*]

Left on his own, Arcade was finally able to get himself under control. He did not feel better, as he usually did on the rare occasions he wept; instead he felt empty, drained and somehow humiliated. A leaden, sick weight filled the center of his chest. Nothing had been resolved.

When Samara came back again, she brought the silence with her.

_Finis._


End file.
